Borf, Muddled Politics, and the Loss of my Immortal Soul (Which May or May Not Exist)

This morning, I came into work at 8am with my cup of coffee and my iPod, sat down at my bare cubicle with my Fujitsu notebook, checked my email, scanned BBC News and wrote an update on a Japanese telecommunications company.

Yesterday, I got up late and watched a Bollywood movie on TV. I went for a swim at the country club (that’s right, country club) and had dinner with my mother at a Shanghainese restaurant in a very trendy, very expat area of Singapore. On Saturday, I woke up late, watched The Great Domestic Showdown, went for a swim at the Country Club and did some other eminently forgettable things.

On Friday, I came into work at 8am with my cup of coffee and my iPod, sat down at my bare cubicle with my tiny Fujitsu notebook, checked my email, scanned BBC News, and researched an American bank. The day before that, I came into work at 8am with my cup of coffee, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, emphasis on the latter.

This is my life. Who am I kidding? This isn’t life as it’s supposed to be. This is routine. This is habit. This is my life measured out in coffee spoons, in 45-minute lunch breaks, and in the filler dialogue between bhangra hits.

Coming into the office is like what a papaya must feel like when it’s put in the fridge. Here’s the incandescent tropical sunshine and the luminous equatorial colours, look, you can just about glimpse it through the window, behind that opaque, sun-blocking shade. And here’s where you’ll be staying, in a chilly, air-conditioned room with fluorescent lighting hurting your eyes. Here are the beige walls. Here’s your faux-wood cubicle, your stapler and your roll of tape.

Enjoy.

But on the other hand, what exactly is the alternative? What, may I ask, is the road less taken? I think that I used to know, but it’s kind of like when you wake up and you don’t remember exactly what it your dream was about. You just know that it was really cool and that you’d like to go back.

Mother of God, is this the rest of my life? Is this what I’ve got to look forward to? Will the high-pitched whine of a fax machine be the soundtrack to the rest of my life?

Maybe Borf, or one of its manifestations in John Tsombikos, has some of it right (apart from his bewildering conception of anarchy—Starbucks, police presence). Maybe age really is just a way of dividing people, of sucking the fun out of life, of thinking of free-form art in terms of $90-an-hour cleaning crews instead of a form of expression, or a cry of defiance against the colossal army of Time, Age, Maturity and Decay. Maybe we should never grow up. Maybe Grown-ups should be rendered obsolete.

Tsombikos described the daily commute as Orwellian. That’s not strictly true. We don’t have a mysterious collective watching over us day and night. Nope, our Big Brother is far more sinister, far more controlling and far more insidious. Our Big Brother is not a physical entity; rather it is our way of life—democracy and capitalism, the ultimate political and economic freedom. What better means of controlling people than to give people the impression that they are in control?

Holy crap, I just got the point of The Matrix.

But anyway, this is what capitalism tells us we want: perfection. To do this we need money. That’s the only way! How we get it is secondary to the ultimate goal; our own personal games of realpolitik.

Of course, it’s not like I have any better ideas. As far as I’m concerned, evolution functions with ideas and beliefs. Democracy, and capitalism seem to be the only memes that haven’t been voted off the island. We all know communism and dictatorships are totally passé, no matter what Cuba and North Korea think. Our buddies D&C seem to be the only viable options we have left, because they seem to fit in with what evolution dictates: that it’s every man, plant, insect, panda or platypus for himself.

I just wish there was some way that I could see an option that didn’t involve the desire to make lots of money. My parents grew up poor, desperately poor, poor in the way that only those in rapidly emerging economies can be poor: consciously so. It’s different when everyone else is poor too; there’s no point for comparison. But they grew up walking to school (hand-me-down sandals, homemade clothing, no books, no food, blazing sunshine, rappelling down ravines, fording white water rapids, etc.) while watching the rich kids get chauffeured to school in imported cars. Part of this never left my parents, especially my dad, so my siblings and I have been brought up with constant reminders that it sucks to be poor and it really sucks to be poor when everyone else is rich, so we should focus on making money.

And he’s probably right, because as my mother says, full belly leads to empty thoughts (or something to that effect, she’s always coming up with this stuff). So maybe if I stopped eating for a few days, I would stop thinking about the inherent flaws in capitalism and my dissatisfaction with the white-collar world

Listening to: "Dare" by the Gorillaz